mercenaries

As a photojournalist who has lived and journeyed through the ‘Black Islands’, Vanuatu resident Ben Bohane was drawn to them because they still seemed like mythical and remote places in an increasingly familiar world, while many of their conflicts...

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, private security companies from the United Kingdom and United States have been seeking personnel for their operations in the Middle East, and many hundreds of Fijians have signed up. The privatisation of security...

Mercenaries expelled from Papua New Guinea in 1997 had worked a year earlier in West Papua assisting Indonesia's notorious Kopassus special forces troops in an operation that caused many civilian deaths.

Claims by sacked Papua New Guinea military commander Jerry Singirok before the first mercenary Commission of Inquiry that Sandline planned to hire a journalist for A$250,000 to 'positively report on Sandline' have been strongly denied by the two...

World coverage on the Sandline affair was in contrast to that of the long-running civil war on Bougainville. Foreign journalists have been kept out and perhaps it is just a coincidence that its horrors have never been live on CNN but now peace is...

Favourable public opinion egged the Papua New Guinea military on and forced Sir Julius Chan's hand over the resignation demand. Military commander Jerry Singirok struck a popular chord when he accused the PNG government of corruption in spite of the...

The news media (both Papua New Guinean and foreign) did a great job carrying the events of the Sandline crisis and the general election in its wake. Journalists and the churches would fight to the end for freedom of the press and preserving the...